Case Study: SUNY Downstate Medical Center cuts brain simulation compute time from days to hours with Google Cloud for Education

SUNY Downstate Medical Center cuts brain simulation compute time from five days to one hour with Google for Education

SUNY Downstate Medical Center needed to upgrade its outdated technological infrastructure to support the computationally-heavy brain simulations conducted by its Neurosim Lab researchers. The challenge was to provide the massive processing power required for these simulations without investing in new on-premise equipment. The institution's CIO, Roy Sookhoo, piloted a transition to the cloud with Google for Education to provide scalable resources.

Google for Education implemented a solution using Google Cloud’s Preemptible Virtual Machines integrated with the Slurm workload manager. This allowed researchers to automatically scale their high-performance computing cluster, running thousands of simulations simultaneously. The results were dramatic, with processing time for complex models cut from several days to just a few hours. Google for Education's solution was also cost-effective, being four times cheaper and enabling researchers to test more hypotheses faster, significantly accelerating their medical research.

SUNY Downstate Medical Center